You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.

What reality was ever made by realists?

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.

Our biggest dreams always start as a simple thought

Immorality, violence, and divorce, with their accompanying sorrows, plague society worldwide.

With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought.

Every wicked man is in ignorance as to what he ought to do, and from what to abstain, and it is because of error such as this that men become unjust and, in a word, wicked.

Never live with someone that won the Heisman.

I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.

Great saints have often been made out of great sinners, but not one was ever made out of a wimp.

A first ascent is a creation in the same sense as is a painting or a song

I gotta make a living somehow, and make ends meet. I accept the idea of having a retirement.

If you're an actor and you don't get cast in stuff a lot, then put together a show or hold play-reading nights at your apartment. Make your own opportunities.